Today the caravanserai of Jalaleddin Weiss in Aleppo has burned down, and he himself is dead, dead perhaps from seeing what he had built (a world of shared ecstasy, of a possibility for change, of participation in alterity) thrown to the flames of war; he has joined Usama on the banks of another river, that great combatant who said of war:
Valor is indeed a sword more solid than any armor
But it protects the lion from the arrow no more
Than it consoles the conquered from shame and ruin.
I wonder what Usama Ibn Munqidh the brave would think of these hilarious photographs of the jihad fighters of today burning musical instruments, since they’re un-Islamic: instruments that come no doubt from old Libyan military fanfares, drums, drums and trumpets sprinkled with gas and set on fire in front of a respectful troop of bearded men, as happy as if they were burning Satan himself. The same drums and trumpets, pretty much, that the Franks copied from the Ottoman military music centuries earlier, the same drums and trumpets that the Europeans described with terror, for they signified the approach of invincible Turkish Janissaries, accompanied by mehters, and no image better represents the terrifying battle that the jihadists are actually waging against the history of Islam than those poor guys in camo, in their slice of desert, attacking sad martial instruments of whose origin they are ignorant.
There wasn’t a single medieval warrior or tattered cutthroat on the nice paved track between Palmyra and Resafa, just a sentry box planted by the side of the deserted road where a few Syrian conscripts were snoozing, shaded by some feeble sheet metal, in their dark-brown winter uniforms despite the heat, in charge of opening a chain that was barring the way and that Bilger only saw at the last moment, forcing him to slam on the brakes and causing the SUV’s tires to screech on the overheated asphalt: who expects an unmarked roadblock in the middle of the desert? The two conscripts, sweating, skulls shaved almost bare, poorly cut, loose-fitting jackets the color of camel shit covered in dust, opened their eyes wide, caught hold of their weapons, walked over to the white Range Rover, observed the three foreigners inside, hesitated, seemed to want to ask a question but finally didn’t dare; one of them lowered the chain, the other made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and Bilger started up again.
Sarah sighed, Bilger had held his tongue. For a few seconds at least.
DRIVER (bragging): I almost took that fucking chain at 120 kilometers per hour.
MALE PASSENGER (in front, respectfully frightened): You might try to drive a little slower and be more attentive.
FEMALE PASSENGER (in back, in French with a touch of anxiety): You think their rifles were loaded?
DRIVER (incredulous): A fucking roadblock in the middle of the desert, that’s not normal.
FEMALE PASSENGER (still in French, anxiety mingled with scientific curiosity): Franz, there was a sign, but I didn’t have the time to read it.
MALE PASSENGER (in the same language): I wasn’t paying attention, sorry.
DRIVER (sure of himself and in German): There must be a military base near here.
MALE PASSENGER (nonchalant): Yes, I saw an army tank over there on the right.
FEMALE PASSENGER (in English, addressing the driver, worried): There are two guys with machine guns in the ditch, slow down, slow down!
DRIVER (vulgarly, suddenly on edge): What are those fucking assholes doing in my way?
MALE PASSENGER (phlegmatic): I think it’s an infantry battalion on maneuvers.
FEMALE PASSENGER (increasingly worried and again in French): But look, good God, look, there are cannons on the hill, over there! And more machine guns on the left! Turn around, turn around!
DRIVER (very Germanically sure of himself, addressing the passenger): If they let us pass, it’s because we have the right to pass. I’ll just slow down a little.
MALE PASSENGER (less sure of himself, in French): Um, sure. We should just be careful.
FEMALE PASSENGER (annoyed): It’s crazy though, look at all those soldiers running over there on the right. And those clouds of dust, is that wind, you think?
MALE PASSENGER (suddenly anxious): I think they’re vehicles rushing through the desert. Tanks, probably.
SAME (to the driver): You’re sure we’re on the right road? According to your compass we’re going more northwest than north. Toward Homs.
DRIVER (annoyed): I’ve taken this road hundreds of times. Unless they’ve paved a second road recently, it’s the right one.
MALE PASSENGER (matter-of-factly): This road does look brand-new.
FEMALE PASSENGER (driving in the nail): This asphalt is too smooth to be trusted.
DRIVER (openly angry): OK, you cowards, I’ll make a U-turn. What a bunch of scaredy-cats!
Bilger finally backtracked, doubly enraged, at having chosen the wrong road first of all, and secondly at having been stopped by an army on maneuvers — back at the checkpoint the two dusty sentries lowered the heavy chain with the same phlegm as on our way in; we’d had time to decipher, with Sarah’s help, the poorly written wooden sign that said “Military terrain — Danger — No Entrance.” It’s strange to think that those tanks and machine guns we saw maneuvering are being used today to fight against the rebellion, to crush entire cities and massacre their inhabitants. We made fun so often of the ragged Syrian soldiers sitting in the shade of their ex-Soviet Jeeps broken down by the side of the road, hood open, waiting for an unlikely tow truck. As if that army had no power of destruction, no force of combat; the Assad regime and his tanks seemed to us like cardboard toys, marionettes, effigies empty of meaning on the walls of cities and villages; we did not see, beyond the apparent dilapidation of the army and the leaders, the reality of fear, death, and torture appearing behind the posters, the possibility of destruction and extreme violence behind the omnipresence of soldiers, badly dressed as they were.
Bilger shone, that day: mad as a hornet at his own mistake, he’d sulked for most of the day, once we had gotten back almost to our starting point, a few kilometers from Palmyra, where in fact the road forked, and the other road was in much worse shape (which explained why we had missed it) heading straight north through the hills of stones, he had insisted, to redeem himself, on showing us a magical place, the famous Qasr el-Heyr, an old Omayyad palace dating back to the end of the seventh century, a palace of pleasures, a gathering place for hunting, where the caliphs from Damascus came to hunt gazelles, listen to music, and drink, drink with their companions the wine that was so thick, so spicy, and so strong that it had to be diluted with water — the poets of the time described this mixture, Sarah said; the meeting of the nectar with water was explosive, sparks rose up; in the cup, the mixture was red as the eye of a rooster. There were in Qasr el-Heyr, Bilger explained, some magnificent frescoes of hunting and drinking scenes — hunting and drinking, but also music: in one of the most famous, you see a musician with a lute accompanying a singer, and even though, obviously, these frescoes had been removed, the idea of seeing this famous castle excited us immensely. Of course I didn’t know that it was Alois Musil who had discovered and described this castle for the first time during his second expedition. To reach it, he’d had to follow the small paved road straight north for about twenty kilometers, then veer to the east on the labyrinth of paths that head out into the desert; our map was very sketchy, but Bilger had a point to prove in finding the castle in question, which he had already visited and which, he said, could be seen from very far away, like a fortress.
The afternoon sun shone white on the stones; here and there, in the midst of the monotony, a mangy thorn bush grew, God knows how; far in the distance you could glimpse a little group of black tents. This part of the badiya wasn’t flat, far from it, but since the hills had no particular vegetation, or any shade, it was extremely difficult to make them out: a tent seen a second earlier would disappear suddenly behind an invisible prominence, as if by magic, which made orientation
even more complicated; sometimes we would go down into deep depressions, cirques where an entire regiment of mounted soldiers could easily hide. The SUV jolted over the pebbles and was beginning to make some spectacular leaps whenever Bilger went over thirty kilometers per hour; he had to reach sixty, flying so to speak over the stones, for the machine to vibrate much less and for the passengers not to be shaken as in some sort of infernal massage chair — but that speed demanded great concentration: a sudden hump, a hole or a big stone sent the car flying; then the skulls of the occupants would crash violently against the roof and the engine would make a horrible grinding noise. So Bilger was clinging with both hands to the steering wheel, teeth clenched, eyes fixed on the road; the muscles of his forearm were prominent, the tendons on his wrist apparent — he reminded me of a war movie from my childhood, where a soldier in the Afrika-korps was driving a Jeep at breakneck speed somewhere in Libya, not on sand as usual, but on sharp, cutting stones, and the soldier was sweating, fingers white from the pressure on the steering wheel, like Bilger. Sarah didn’t seem to realize how strenuous this was; she was reading us the story by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, “Beni Zainab,” in a loud voice, in French, about the meeting in Palmyra with Marga d’Andurain we had talked about so much last night: we kept asking her if reading under such circumstances made her carsick, but no, unfortunately, aside from the book leaping in front of her eyes with every jolt, nothing seemed to bother her. Bilger didn’t stop himself from making ironic remarks, in German of course: “You did well to bring an audio book, it’s pleasant during long journeys. It allows me to improve my French.” I’d so have liked to be next to her in the back seat; I hoped without believing it too much that the following night we’d again share the same blanket and this time I’d find the courage to leap into the water, or rather onto her mouth — Bilger said we’d probably be forced to camp in Qasr el-Heyr: impossible to drive in the desert at night, which would suit me nicely.
My wishes were about to be fulfilled, not exactly in the sense of my aspirations, but fulfilled nonetheless: we would be sleeping in the desert. Three hours later, we were driving more or less eastward at a speed wavering between five and sixty kilometers per hour. As none of us had thought to look at the odometer when we left, we didn’t really know the distance we had traveled; the map was no help: it only indicated one east–west road in the sector whereas, on the ground, dozens of roads crossed and recrossed endlessly; only the little compass on Bilger’s dashboard indicated that we were headed more or less northward.
Bilger was beginning to get annoyed. He swore as much as he could, tapped on the steering wheel; he said it was impossible, we should already have passed the Palmyra–Deir ez-Zor highway, look at the map, he shouted, it’s impossible, it’s completely impossible, it’s ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE, but we had to face facts: we were lost. At least, not lost, but disoriented. I think I remember that it was Sarah who had introduced this nuance to assuage Bilger’s pride, a nuance I had every difficulty in the world rendering into German: it consoled Bilger only a little, he kept cursing under his breath like a child whose toy isn’t working. We had made a long stop to climb a rocky mound, hoping the panoramic view might offer us a reference point — the Deir ez-Zor highway or the famous Omayyad castle itself. But what seemed to us to be like a promontory turned out to be more or less at the same level as the environs, there was nothing to see, just our car which was a little lower than the general level of the desert. That green spot toward the north (was it really north?) was a field of spring wheat or a square of grass, those black points groups of tents. We weren’t risking much, except not seeing Qasr el-Heyr today. The afternoon was well-advanced — the sun was beginning to set behind us, to Bilger’s great despair; I thought of Alois Musil, great discoverer of Omayyad castles, and his exploration missions: in 1898, after studying all the Western documents on the region of Maan and the travelers’ accounts at the library of the Jesuit Saint Joseph University in Beirut, he had set off, on camel-back, in the company of a few Ottoman gendarmes “loaned” by the kaimmakam of Akaba, into the desert to find the famous pleasure castle of Qasr Tuba, which no one had heard of for centuries, except the Bedouins. What courage, what faith, or what madness animated the little Catholic priest from Bohemia for him to burrow into the void like that, weapon on his shoulder, in the midst of tribes of nomads who were all more or less hostile to Ottoman power and who regularly engaged in pillaging or war? Had he too felt the terror of the desert, that solitary anguish that clenches your chest in the immensity, the great violence of the immensity that one imagines hides many dangers and pains — pains and perils of the soul and body together, thirst, hunger, of course, but also solitude, abandon, despair; it was amusing to think, from the top of this little pile of pebbles of no importance, that the Musil cousins, Alois and Robert, had, each in a very different way, experienced loneliness and abandonment: Robert in the debris of Imperial Vienna, Alois thousands of kilometers away, among the nomads; both had traveled through ruins. I remembered the beginning of The Man Without Qualities (is it really the beginning?), when Ulrich meets prowlers armed with lead-filled truncheons who leave him for dead on the Viennese sidewalk; he is helped by a very beautiful young woman who takes him into her car and he holds forth ironically, during the trip, on the similarities between the experience of violence and that of mysticism: for cousin Alois, the desert was — I thought while watching Sarah toil over the gravel on the slope of the little mound just as Ulrich had encountered his Bona Dea under the truncheon’s blows — the place of illumination and of abandonment, where God also showed himself by his absence, by his contours, a contradiction that Ulrich, in Robert Musil’s novel, pointed out: “Brutality and love are no farther apart than one wing of a big, colorful, silent bird is from the other. He had put the emphasis on the wings and on that bright, mute bird — a notion that did not make much sense but was charged with some of that vast sensuality with which life simultaneously satisfies all the rival contradictions in its measureless body. He now noticed that his neighbor had no idea what he was talking about, and that the soft snowfall she was diffusing inside the cab had grown thicker.” Sarah is that snowfall over the desert, I thought as she had almost joined me on top of this observation post from which there was nothing to observe.
I think I’m dozing off, slowly falling asleep, my face caressed by a desert breeze, in the 9th district of this New Vienna that neither of the two Musils knew, on my pillow under my duvet — my indoor nomad tent, as deep and spacious as the one that welcomed us that night, in the desert: like Alois Musil’s guides, a heavy, swaying truck had suddenly stopped near us, thinking we were in distress; its occupants (tanned, wrinkled faces wrapped in red keffiehs, stiff mustaches cutting their faces in half) had explained to us that the castle we were looking for was even farther toward the northeast, three good hours on the road, and that we’d never reach it before nightfall: they had invited us to sleep under their black tent, in true Bedouin tradition. We weren’t the only ones invited: already sitting in the “salon” was a strange peddler, a strolling merchant of the desert who sold, from immense gray nylon bags, like huge wineskins, hundreds of objects made of plastic — cups, sieves, buckets, flip-flops, children’s toys, or tin — teapots, coffeepots, dishes, cutlery; his huge sacks in front of the tent looked like two fat, shapeless larvae or the degenerate pods of some hellish plant. This peddler was from northern Syria and had no vehicle: he traveled the badiya at the mercy of the trucks and tractors of the nomads, going from tent to tent until he had sold everything, and then returning to Aleppo to stock up again in the labyrinth of souks. He would take up his travels as soon as his stock was complete, go down the Euphrates by bus, then crisscross the entire territory between the river, Palmyra and the Iraqi border, taking advantage (abusing, a Westerner would think) of the hospitality of the nomads, who were his customers as well as his hosts. This T. E. Lawrence of cutlery must no doubt have been something of a spy and informed the authorities about the de
eds and movements of these tribes who maintained such close ties with Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Kuwait: I was very surprised to learn that I was in a house (which is what a tent is called, in Arabic) of the clan of the Mutayrs, the famous warrior tribe that allied with Ibn Saud in the early 1920s and permitted his rise to power, before rebelling against him. The tribe of the passport-husband of Marga. Muhammad Asad the Jew from Arabia tells how he himself took part in an espionage operation in Kuwait for Ibn Saud, against the Mutayrs of Faysal Dawish. These great warriors seemed (at least in their Syrian version) to be the most peaceful variety: they were breeders of sheep and goats, and had a truck and some chickens. Out of modesty, Sarah had tied back her hair as well as she could in the car as we followed the Bedouins’ truck to their tent: the setting sun, when she got out of the car, set her hair on fire just before she penetrated the shade cast by the black canvas; no more second night under the stars next to Sarah, what bad luck, I thought, what damn bad luck that we hadn’t managed to reach that lost castle. The inside of the animal-skin house was dark and welcoming; a wall of reeds interwoven with red and green cloth divided the tent in half, one side for the men, the other for the women. The head of this home, the patriarch, was a very old man with a smile lit up by gold teeth, talkative as a magpie: he spoke three words of French, which he had learned in the army of the Levant in which he had served during the French mandate over Syria: “Debout! Couché! Marchez!” [“Stand up! Lie down! March!”], orders that he shouted two by two with intense joy, “deboutcouché! couchémarchez!” happy not just from the simple pleasure of the reminiscence, but also from the presence of a French-speaking audience that could appreciate these martial orders — our Arabic was too basic (especially Bilger’s, which was limited to “dig, shovel, pickax,” another version of “deboutcouchémarchez”) to understand the many stories of that octogenarian clan chief, but Sarah managed, as much out of empathy as linguistic savvy, to follow the old man’s tales and, more or less, to translate the general meaning when it escaped us. Of course, Sarah’s first question to the local Methuselah was about Marga d’Andurain, countess of Palmyra — had he known her? The sheikh rubbed his beard and shook his head, no, he had heard of her, of that Palmyran comta, but no more — no contact with the legend, Sarah must have been disappointed. We drank a decoction of cinnamon bark, sweet and fragrant, sitting cross-legged on the wool rugs that were placed on the bare ground; a black dog had barked when we approached, the guard of the flock who protected the animals from jackals and even hyenas: the stories of hyenas that the grandfather, his sons and the peddler told us made our hair stand on end. Sarah was in seventh heaven, immediately recovering from her disappointment at not having met one of the last witnesses of the reign of Marga d’Andurain the desert poisoner; she turned often toward me with a complicit smile, and I knew she was finding in these magical stories the tales of ghouls and other fantastic animals she had studied: the hyena, which had almost disappeared from these lands, gathered the most extraordinary legends around it. The old sheikh was a first-rate storyteller, a great actor; with a brief sweep of his hand, he silenced his sons or the peddler to have the pleasure of telling a story he knew himself — the hyena, he said, hypnotizes men who have the misfortune of meeting its gaze; they are then forced to follow it through the desert up to its cave, where it torments and finally devours them. It pursues those who manage to escape it in their dreams; its contact makes horrible pustules appear — not surprising that these poor beasts have been extravagantly slaughtered, I thought. As for the jackal, it was contemptible but inoffensive; its long cry pierced the night — I found these groans particularly sinister, but they didn’t come close, the Bedouins argued, to the atrocious call of the hyena, which had the ability to fix you to the spot and freeze you with terror: whoever heard this raucous growl remembered it for the rest of their lives.
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